In recent years, celebrity photography has been largely reduced to off-guard, gotcha-style paparazzi shots or heavily stylized photos invented for the camera. This was not always so: as recently as the early ’90s, portraits of celebrities took many forms besides the abrasive or the massaged. As practiced by photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, celebrity portraiture was meant to reveal the soul of its subject — to unearth the mix of qualities that made a person captivating. Avedon’s photographs of, say, Elizabeth Taylor, or Penn’s of Marlene Dietrich have a stunning immediacy and a deep humanity. Although Avedon was, and Penn is, an expert fashion photographer, able to create a mood through shape and design and style, neither used clothes to define his subjects. In their best portraits, character trumps fashion.

Unfortunately, the reverse is now the norm. Most top actresses (and many actors) are now used by many magazines as models. They are dressed, coiffed and made-up by a team chosen by a stylist who coordinates with the photographer (and the magazine — even if it’s not a fashion magazine). What results is the look of the season; the photos, almost always retouched to achieve a kind of high-gloss perfection, may be lovely, but they bear little trace of anything real.

The flip side of all this careful manipulation is the raw aggression of the tabloids. Publishing images of stars in their daily lives, preferably with their children, has become a hugely profitable business. That may have always been true, but today, paparazzi shots have increasingly displaced other kinds of documentary photography. In the ’60s, by contrast, the photo agency Magnum sent a team of photographers to the set of “The Misfits,” where they were given full access to the movie’s stars. The resulting pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift were intimate and natural, capturing the celebrities both at rest and at work.

It was in that spirit that we approached our sixth-annual best performance portfolio. In the past, we have spotlighted a large group of actors and actresses, but for 2008, we chose to concentrate on only eight individuals who did remarkable work this year. We photographed Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Frank Langella, Robert Downey Jr., Kate Winslet, Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn and a newcomer named Kat Dennings in a documentary fashion, without the use of a stylist or hair or makeup experts. We asked Paolo Pellegrin, who has brilliantly photographed everything from Olympic athletes to refugees from Darfur to President Obama's campaign, to tackle the world of celebrity.

Pellegrin was able to accompany Pitt to Berlin, where he is working on his next movie; Cruz as she rehearsed for her role in the film “Nine”; Winslet as she primped for the red carpet; Penn as he made a hamburger at home; Rourke as he cuddled his beloved Chihuahua, Loki, in London; Langella as he was fitted for a tuxedo before an awards show; Downey Jr. as he shared a laugh with his wife; and Dennings in the bath at her house in Los Angeles. The idea was to revive a kind of celebrity portraiture that has all but disappeared — documentary photographs that both illuminate and examine the lives of celebrated individuals.

According to my own highly unscientific survey, just about everybody loves Kate Winslet. Actually, it wasn’t a survey at all, just me going about my business around the time that Winslet starred in “Little Children,” Todd Field’s film adaptation of my novel. Kate Winslet! people would exclaim, their faces brightening at the mention of her name. I love Kate Winslet! They loved her for all sorts of reasons: She seems like such a nice person, so down-to-earth. She doesn’t look like she starves herself.She’s so different from one movie to the next. The fans who knew her from “Titanic” hadn’t necessarily caught her in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — and vice versa — but both groups thought she was a terrific actress. As you might expect, a lot of men appreciated her fearless on-screen sexuality, but a surprising number of women responded to her on this level as well. Lesbians, I was informed, have a special fondness for Kate. They think she’s a goddess, a helpful friend explained.

Winslet’s apparently universal appeal isn’t unique, but it is mysterious. After all, everybody loves Tom Hanks and Will Smith, too, but that’s by design — those guys want us to love them. Everything they do, on-screen and off, cements their reputations as likable everymen, latter-day Jimmy Stewarts. They play war heroes and superheroes and selfless dads and little boys trapped in the bodies of grown men. Winslet, on the other hand, gravitates toward troubling roles in smaller films — a teenage murderer (“Heavenly Creatures”), a prickly novelist who succumbs to Alzheimer’s (“Iris”), the Marquis de Sade’s chambermaid (“Quills”). If we love Hanks and Smith because of the characters they play, we love Winslet in spite of them. Some of her choices may be dictated by necessity — there aren’t a whole lot of heroic parts available to women in Hollywood — but it’s hard to ignore a certain perverse streak in her decision making. Who else would have followed a breakout role in America’s biggest blockbuster ever with a starring turn in a tiny film called “Hideous Kinky”?

It’s not that Winslet doesn’t care what people think of her; at times she seems all too sensitive to the dangers she’s courting by playing so many thorny, potentially unsympathetic characters. I learned this firsthand after the release of “Little Children,” in which she plays Sarah, an unhappy stay-at-home mom who carries on a passionate affair with a handsome stay-at-home dad (Patrick Wilson) during their toddlers’ naptime. It’s an astonishing, vulnerable, painfully funny, ferociously honest performance, one of the finest of her career.

Publicizing the film, though, Winslet went to what I considered excessive lengths to separate herself from Sarah, stating in interview after interview how hard it was for her to play a “bad mother.” It got to the point that I began to feel sorry for both the character — Sarah wasn’t really a bad mother, just a terribly distracted one — and the actress, who had brought her to life with such subtlety and compassion that a summary judgment like “bad mother” seemed not just inadequate, but totally beside the point. I wondered if Winslet was beating a strategic retreat, preparing to refashion her career along more conventional Hollywood lines, a suspicion that only deepened with her appearance in “The Holiday,” a fluffy romantic comedy unlike anything she had ever done before.

But it turns out that my worries were misplaced, because Winslet is back this year with two remarkable performances — as a Nazi war criminal in “The Reader” and as a disillusioned ’50s-era housewife in “Revolutionary Road” — that make it clearer than ever that she’s both the finest and the most uncompromising actress of her generation.

Oddly enough, Hanna Schmitz, the former Nazi prison guard Winslet plays in “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, is by far the more sympathetic of the two characters. Partly this is because we see her only in peacetime — first as the older lover of a teenage boy, and then as a bewildered defendant in a war-crimes trial — but also because Winslet makes her intellectual limitations so insistently vivid. For all her Teutonic gruffness and unembarrassed sexuality — even by Winslet’s standards, “The Reader”has a lot of sex — Hanna remains a kind of child throughout the first half of the film, unwilling to face the horrors she helped perpetrate. While this has the effect of pushing “The Reader” into uncomfortable allegorical territory — at times, the movie comes perilously close to offering an implicit excuse for her crimes and for the crimes of other ordinary Germans who were just following orders — Hanna herself refuses any kind of absolution. The intellectual awakening she undergoes in prison — portrayed by Winslet as a kind of quiet ecstasy — only deepens her awareness of her own guilt. She grows old before our eyes, a woman who understands all too well that she is beyond forgiveness.

If Hanna is literally incarcerated, April Wheeler in “Revolutionary Road” — the film, directed by Winslet’s husband, Sam Mendes, is based on Richard Yates’s pitiless 1961 novel — considers herself a virtual prisoner of suburbia. On the surface, April is vaguely reminiscent of Sarah in “Little Children” — both are ex-bohemians, trapped in their pleasantly conventional surroundings, uncomfortably inhabiting the roles of mother and homemaker — but their dreams of escape are entirely different. Sarah wants love; April believes she already has it and simply wants to move to Paris, where she and her husband, Frank (Leonard DiCaprio), can live the creative, interesting lives they deserve. Sarah’s fantasy survives until very close to the end of “Little Children”; throughout the film, she’s an energetic and hopeful — if slightly deluded — character. April’s dream dies earlier, and she spends the second half of the movie in a state of escalating desperation. Furious with Frank, she has sex with a neighbor in the front seat of a car; the scene is short and brutal — the man appears to be suffocating her — and ends with her cutting off his breathless declarations of love: “Please just be quiet for a minute, then you can take me home.” But the high point of the movie comes a little later, on the morning when April has come to a fateful decision, a rejection of her marriage and of motherhood far more absolute than any that Sarah could have imagined. Instead of sharing her decision with Frank, she gets up, cooks him a big breakfast and makes cheerfully innocuous small talk, impersonating the vapid suburban housewife she believes he wants her to be. The confusion on DiCaprio’s face is priceless — he knows this isn’t April, it can’t possibly be — but Winslet plays her role with such conviction it’s impossible not to believe her.

It seems logical, somehow, that an actor who became famous for playing Dracula should have his greatest success playing Richard Nixon — no disrespect to Dracula intended. Frank Langells has been on stage and screen now for almost a half-century. He has taken on roles from Antonio Salieri to Sherlock Holmes, the Daily Planet editor Perry White, the Lolita-loving Clare Quilty, the CBS chief executive William Paley in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Cyrano de Bergerac and a White House chief of staff in Ivan Reitman’s “Dave.” Moving laterally — and vertically — from one room in the West Wing to the Oval Office, he has now received an Oscar nomination for best actor in “Frost/Nixon.” Watching Langella become Richard Nixon during the course of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the Peter Morgan play, I thought it seemed fitting that this performance should come at this late stage in his career. As Langella has remarked, his leading-man days are over; he’s a character actor now, and Nixon is, you might say, the ultimate character.

I saw “Frost/Nixon” on Broadway, with Langella as Nixon, and admired it greatly, but onstage, Langella’s Nixon was half the show, along with Michael Sheen’s David Frost. With all due kudos to Sheen, this is Langella’s movie. When he’s not onscreen, you’re waiting for him to come back on. I reflect that I spent a good part of my youth wanting Richard Nixon to go away. Langella has managed to make me want more of him.

He told Charlie Rose, “I just didn’t think it was in my bag of tricks,” but he threw himself into the research as he never had before. He visited Nixon’s boyhood home in Yorba Linda, Calif., and spent an entire hour in the tiny bedroom Nixon shared with his brothers, soaking up the humiliation and inadequacy that Nixon grew up with. He talked to everyone, watched the tapes, and “then flung it all away and said, it has to be my Nixon. It has to be the essence of the man rather than an imitation.”

Several scenes into the movie, I thought, Incredible — he’s playing it as comedy.

Explaining who Irving Lazar is to his aide Jack Brennan: “This is my literary agent from Hollywood. Hygiene-obsessed.”

Coyly admiring Frost’s Italian loafers: “You don’t find them too effeminate? I guess someone in your field can get away with it.”

More:“I wouldn’t want to be a Russian leader. They never know when they’re being taped.”

“You’re probably aware of my history with perspiration.”

“Two million?” he says when Frost tells him what the production is costing. “I didn’t realize we were making ‘Ben-Hur.’ ”

What makes these lines so desperately funny is that they’re spoken by one of the 20th century’s most tragic figures. As another president might put it, you feel the man’s pain. But then — finita la commedia, in the (entirely fictional) scene in which a tipsy Nixon phones Frost to rage at the people who have looked down on him all his life and to tell him that in the final interview, he’s going to come after him with everything he’s got, and only one of them will survive.

In the movie’s climactic scene, the April 22, 1977, interview, Frost nails Nixon to his own, handmade cross and extracts the famous apologia. “I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish.” Nixon is as helpless, pathetic and broken as Bogart’s Captain Queeg, unraveling under José Ferrer’s cross-examination.

There is an almost Pinocchio effect, as some have observed: Nixon’s ski-jump nose seems to grow during the movie. In interviews, Langella has refuted the suggestion that his prosthetic proboscis increases over the course of the drama. It just seems that way, which in itself is proxy tribute to the inner transformation that Langella is illuminating.

Nixon has been played by a number of actors over the years. Anthony Hopkins earned an Oscar nomination for his Nixon in 1995, and Lane Smith turned in a memorable Nixon in “The Final Days,” alongside Theodore Bikel’s Henry Kissinger. But Frank Langella now owns Nixon, as surely as Gielgud, whose Shakespeare recordings Langella listened to as a young actor in order to shed his New Jersey accent, owned Hamlet for a time.

In the movie, Frost decides, as a gamble, to start off the first of the four, 90-minute interviews by asking Nixon, “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” It fails, as a trap. Wily — rather, tricky — Nixon ties him up in videotape by prattling on endlessly about how all the presidents before him taped, and how essential it was to have accurate recordings of high-level blah, blah, blah. We never get the answer.

I met Nixon only once, about a year after the “Nixon-Frost” (as they were called) interviews were shown, and somewhat cheekily asked him that exact question. He paused, nodded pensively, averting his eyes, then said, slowly, “Well . . . there were those at the time who said that would be . . .” — I thought, Is he actually going to say “wrong”? — “. . . for the best. But we didn’t and . . .” — a rueful, pained smile played across his face — “here we are.”

That moment has stuck vividly in my mind for more than 30 years. But now, as I summon it from memory, it’s Frank Langella who’s sitting in that armchair high up in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, smiling at me sadly, wishing it had been otherwise.

If you’re talking about Robert Downey Jr. (c) and Iron Man (a), it’s actually not an irrelevant question. The superhero co-creator Stan Lee based the character of the industrialist Tony Stark (Iron Man’s not-so-secret identity) on none other than Howard Hughes (b) in his heyday. I consider myself a true fan of ol’ Shellhead (Iron Man’s Marvel geek nickname), but I had forgotten this aspect of his off-page origin while watching the movie. It’s a curious fact that lends Downey’s riveting performance in the role even more poignancy than it already had. And it already had a lot.

When we first got word that Mr. Downey Jr. had officially signed on to be Iron Man, well, we were giggling with girlish glee. The “we” in question being the mouth-breathing, myopic, trapped-in-adolescence-forever, comics-geek faux-cognoscenti. This was too good to be true. Why? Well for one thing, he’s a real actor. If there’s anything die-hard comics fans want it’s for their fantasies to be taken seriously. We have an insatiable ache for credibility so we can continue to play with our toys. This is the same reason we were so excited about poor Heath.

Bring on the Oscar nominees! (The axiom, alas, is not infallible. The less said about Ang Lee’s “Hulk,” the better. Or Edward Norton’s.)

But that was just the half of it. The best thing was we knew, without even reading the script, that Tony Stark’s story was Robert Downey Jr.’s story. It was eerily perfect, really. Consider:

A brilliant star in his field, at the top of his game, who because of hubris and bad decisions (and a large dollop of moral weakness) finds himself in dire circumstances of his own making. Just when it looks the darkest, he manages to summon his wits and willpower to overcome the demons and not only survive, but thrive. He makes himself better than he ever was. And he looks really, really cool.

And here’s where the obvious tragedy of Howard Hughes comes in. Hughes was a real, live Stark (and by extension Downey) but without the redeeming third act.

Considering Hughes’s fate when comparing Stark and Downey has the effect of separating one from the other — Stark is a fiction; and Robert is real — but when they are united on screen, the amalgam (in comics we call it a team-up) makes the fantasy totally plausible. We know Downey’s been through hell, so we have no trouble believing Stark has too.

And that’s something else we geeks crave, maybe more than anything. No matter how fantastic, we want it all to be as possible as possible.

Downey’s battle with substance abuse has been well documented in the media — the arrests, the missed court-ordered drug tests, the year in prison, the attempts at rehab, the relapses, the aforementioned barefoot hike through Culver City, the famous quote about the gun in his mouth and his fondness for the taste of it. It was public and prolonged and excruciating to watch, mainly because we genuinely liked him so much. He was the über-cool son of your arty uncle who had so much potential and just couldn’t get his act together. We wanted to help, but it was out of our hands. As with any addict, it was going to be up to him to decide that he wanted to be free of it.

And, by God, finally, he did.

All of this subtext is only part of what makes the movie work so well. The sheer design-o-rama aspect of it is just as enthralling. I can’t remember a live-action movie with this much love for the design process since Coppola’s “Tucker.” The huge pleasure comes from watching Stark actually create this amazing thing, step by step, and then beta-test it. And then modify it accordingly. And then righteously kick butt with it. Oh, yes. And Downey has his own design side too — he presented the 2006 Design Patron Award to his friend, the real estate developer Craig Robins; and he designed the cover for his own record album, “The Futurist.” When, in the film, Stark/Downey is creating his Iron Man suit in his lab and figuring things out, it doesn’t seem like he’s acting. The impression is that in another life this is what Downey the real person would have actually wanted to be and do. It’s design as performance.

We fans of Iron Man in the comics have a fair idea of what’s in store for Stark in the movie sequel, and we already feel sorry for him. Suffice it to say that Marvel Comics turned Stark into a hopeless alcoholic for nine issues in 1979 and had him hit rock bottom in a story line called “Demon in a Bottle.” This was a comics milestone and, for an A-list mainstream superhero, unprecedented. It’s hard to imagine it won’t play at least some part in “Iron Man 2.” And if it does, it could provide Downey with an opportunity to deliver an even more affecting performance than before. I have no doubt he’ll rise (or sink, as needed) to the occasion. And I can’t wait.

In the meantime, we have his fascinating, maddening, boy-genius, enfant-terrible, ultimately redeemed Stark (with the atomically powered heart) from the first installment, and this is the most remarkable thing: what you see — both on the screen and behind it — is proof that no matter how badly someone has messed things up, no matter how far he has fallen, it doesn’t have to be the end of the story if he really doesn’t want it to be. With enough determination, talent, ingenuity, humility and sheer force of will, a flawed human being (aren’t we all?) can still triumph.

The first movie I saw Sean Penn in was “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” 27 years ago. I have to say I remember nothing about that movie — not the plot or the other actors or Ridgemont High itself — only Sean Penn’s stoned-out, radically innocent face, his mouth a little open and his eyes a little closed, his hair hanging down to either side. He was ugly and dopey but good-natured and charming, and there was something about his walk that persuaded you that he was a surfer, that he was athletic and strong and limber and they had found him on a beach somewhere and put him in a movie.

Something about his walk. The same is true in “Milk.” The same is true in “I Am Sam.” The same is true in “The Interpreter.” In “The Interpreter” he walks like a tough, self-contained, gun-toting Secret Service officer — in other words, like most guys in movies walk. It’s only in contrast with all the other walks he can walk that this looks like a performance. In “Milk” his walk is loose and sinuous. At a political rally, the camera shoots him from behind, and his hips are canted to one side; he is an unashamed gay man inviting other gay men to throw off their shame. What’s even more remarkable about Penn’s performance is that as his Harvey Milk gains conviction and confidence, as his world of the Castro becomes populated and assertive, the details of his walk evolve.

They build to the grace of his last scene, in which his walk contrasts so starkly with that of Josh Brolin, who is stiff with fear and anger, that when Penn goes down the movie seems to be portraying not only a shocking moment of recent American history but also the eternal tragic recognition that grace and love are fleeting, while fear and resentment are perennial.

No one ever accused Penn of having movie-star looks, but when he is on the screen, the faces of the other actors fade out, because his face is so expressive. His thoughts and feelings seem to flicker across his features moment by moment, no matter who is speaking or where the camera is focused. The effect can be to give a bit of woodenness to his co-stars, as he did to Robert Di Nero in “We’re No Angels” and to Michelle Pfeiffer in “I Am Sam.” As a result, he is a master at playing vulnerable characters and at revealing the vulnerabilities of tough characters, like Jimmy Markum in “Mystic River.” Jimmy is lean and hawkish, with a history of violent behavior, and Penn excels at showing how difficult it is for Jimmy both to give up his old habits and to embrace them. As violent as Jimmy has been, the most benevolent viewer can’t help sympathizing with his struggle and lamenting when, at the end, he puts on his sunglasses, taking temporary refuge in his refusal to face the fact that he has killed one of his oldest friends. Both Penn, as Jimmy, and Kevin Bacon, as Sean, know that there is more pain to come.

I think the key to Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk is his comic timing. If dying is hard and comedy is harder, then Penn gives Harvey the energy and quickness of a comic performance. His pacing is superb, and his movements — walking, running, talking — have buoyancy, even effervescence, that contrasts with the dramatic gravity of everyone else in the movie. They all think Harvey is unrealistic, crazy, foolish — even his haircut and the way he wears his belt are foolish. But being a fool is Harvey’s greatest quality and clearly part of the reason Dan White can’t tolerate his rise. The people around Harvey laugh at him, we laugh at him, and Penn is bold enough to go for the laughs without seeming to realize that death is all around. In the last frames, Dan shoots him, and Harvey’s mouth and eyes open in surprise. That we are not surprised makes it all the more affecting.

Why does Sean Penn remind me of James Cagney? If I met Jimmy Markum in a dark alley, I think he would have more remorse about killing me than would Cody Jarrett (Cagney’s character in “White Heat”), but both Cagney and Penn are great at expressing the heat of conflicting desires — it’s in their posture, in the way they move their feet, in the set of their shoulders, in their faces. Both of them make other actors seem slow and cool. Both of them make every script unpredictable. Yes, I know before I see “Mystic River” or “Milk” that mayhem and grief will ensue, but somehow, as the movie unfolds, Sean Penn makes me think that he might just evade his fate after all.

I’m not sure when I first met Kat Dennings. She played my daughter in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and one day, we were having a read-through of the script and I looked over and there was this lovely girl. I thought, Who is this girl? She was kind of lit up from within. When someone is that beautiful, it’s great when they’re funny too, and from the beginning, Kat had her own rhythm: a way of being funny and emotional at the same time.

A lot of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was shot like a controlled improvisation. Anything and everything was welcome, and the director, Judd Apatow, never yelled “cut.” It took me a while to get used to that style of working, but Kat was a natural. In one scene her character, who is anxious to give up her virginity, is battling with me. As her mom, I don’t want her to grow up too fast. Kat’s character is in the bathroom, crying, and I’m outside the door with Steve Carell, who played my boyfriend. Kat was just screaming at me — cursing and yelling and calling me all kinds of names that were not in the script. I was thrown and I turned to Steve and I said, “I don’t know what she’s talking about.” Even though it was improvised, Judd kept that line in the movie — I clearly sounded like a frustrated mom and it was all due to Kat’s rant.

During the shoot, I looked out for Kat. I think we all did. I was protective of her and I stayed in touch with her after the movie was finished. It’s tough on young girls in Hollywood — it’s easy to fall into the tabloid culture. But that’s not what she’s made of. Kat has beauty and youth and talent, but there’s something else that sets her apart: she’s comfortable being different.

When I was casting “Diner” in 1980, Mickey Rourke came in for an audition. He hadn’t done any films yet, and I was looking for certain characteristics: I wanted a guy who didn’t look like the “Grease” version of the ’50s but like a true ’50s man, like the guys I grew up with.

Boogie, the character Mickey was reading for, was a hairdresser but kind of tough, and very smooth with women. I remember Mickey coming in and leaning against the doorjamb and, immediately, sensing this mix of toughness and vulnerability. There was a fragility that was part of Mickey’s nature, and that combination of strength and fragility impressed me. If you met him back then, you knew immediately that this kid had something very special, that he might define the next generation of actors.

Mickey had an unpredictable nature, which worked for the character. Leading men come along and they re-establish what a leading man is. They say a line in a film and you think, That’s really interesting. As an audience, we lean forward in our seats and take notice. That’s how it was with Mickey and “Diner.” We all saw how great he was. And we all wondered how it was going to play out.

The difficulties of the business are hard to understand from the outside. Sometimes, very talented people have a fragile aspect to them, and it’s easy to send them off course. An actor can easily slide one way or another. One day, you’re celebrated, and the next, you’re out of the business. After “Diner,” Mickey and I tried to work together on a movie about Jerry Lee Lewis, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t see him during the time he was struggling, but then about two years ago, I saw Mickey, and I could tell he was trying to turn things around. I thought he was wonderful in “The Wrestler.” If you look at the film in a simplistic way, it’s about a talented guy who hits bottom. That mimics Mickey’s life in many ways. But although there’s a lot of Mickey in that character, he gives the movie an emotional gravity that is never one-note. Mickey can do things with great simplicity: he carries the movie with enormous grace.

It’s often hard for actors to accept their own strengths. There’s a tendency toward self-destructive behavior in very talented people. Look at Brando, look at Orson Welles or Montgomery Clift. They were brilliant and self-destructive. It’s a mystery why that is. But it is also true for Mickey. Some actors lose their way and they never put it together again. But by playing a guy in “The Wrestler” who is no longer what he was, Mickey has been reborn.

From the first time I saw Penélope Cruz — in the film “Jamón, Jamón,” her debut with the Spanish director Bigas Luna, in 1992 — I knew I wanted to work with her.I remember Penélope walking sulkily in front or Javier Bardem, who was following her on a motorbike. Her way of walking, of talking, of looking at him, of getting angry with him, was so real, so natural and personal that you couldn’t take your eyes off her. Fortunately, Penélope hasn’t lost the freshness and flair of her early days, as she has just shown, playing opposite the same actor, curiously enough, 16 years later in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

Despite my intense desire to work with her, I didn’t manage to do so until five years after “Jamón, Jamón.” I wondered whether to give her the leading role in “Live Flesh,” but she was too young. Penélope has always been too young for the characters I write. She was for “Volver” and also for “Broken Embraces,” our latest collaboration, but for some time such drawbacks have ceased to worry me. Penélope can do everything; she has become an eternal, ageless woman.

The opening sequence of “Live Flesh” is a set piece I wrote for her. It lasts eight minutes, and the viewer comes away with the impression that she is one of the film’s main characters, though she doesn’t reappear. Penélope plays a girl from the country — very poor and coarse — who gives birth on a bus, on an inhospitable night in Madrid in 1970, when Spain was still under Franco’s rule. I remember that our biggest problem was how to make her look ugly. All the very humble, secondhand ’70s clothes we had bought looked wonderful on her. It was hard for her to look poor and provincial. Penélope’s body gave a touch of distinction to the fabric in those clothes. Fortunately, she had a lot of heart and a kind of natural strength, her trademark.

Penélope Cruz belongs to the Mediterranean school of acting, a style that is characterized by its carnality, gutsiness, shamelessness, messy hair, generous cleavage and shouting as a natural form of communication. Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, the early Silvana Mangano, even Elizabeth Taylor and Rachel Weisz, mastered this style. Penélope’s Raimunda in “Volver” was modeled on Magnani, Loren and Cardinale, and I guess that it was the messy-haired, loud-voiced Penélope that inspired Woody Allen to cast her as the mentally unstable artist in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a role for which in the past few months she seems to receive an award every other day.

I’m delighted that after a long period wandering in the wilderness at the beginning of this century, when she appeared in a series of American films that didn’t work,Penélope managed to shatter the image of empty beauty in which Hollywood pigeonholed her. In 2003, she returned to Europe, to star in the Italian film “Non Ti Muovere” (“Don’t Move”), by Sergio Castellitto, as an impoverished woman who has a passionate affair with a surgeon, and re-established her reputation as an artist.

Last year she finally came into her own in America, as she had already done in the rest of the world. Penélope is one of the most versatile actresses with whom I’ve worked. And this season she has proved it, with two performances in very different keys: the hysterical, very funny painter in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and the young, neatly coiffed student in “Elegy.”

What will 2009 bring? For starters, “Broken Embraces,” a hard-nosed drama with the feel of a thriller, and Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” a remake of Fellini’s “8½.” My film is finished, and I’ve seen images from “Nine,” and I can tell you that this year Penélope Cruz will continue to plumb depths we haven’t seen before.

After watching “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the movie in which the hero, played by Brad Pitt, grows young rather than old, I realized that I liked the gnarled, wrinkled octogenarian and the beaming child better than the strapping character in the middle, who looks more or less like the actor’s own beautiful self. I wondered whether this was because of his performance or because of some prejudice in me against the overexposed image of a Hollywood glamour boy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, on which the film is based, is a slight, comic fable, told with considerable ironic distance. In the film, Fitzgerald’s conceit — “ungrowth” — becomes visible, and the hero’s changing appearance dominates the action. At birth, Pitt’s Button looks 85 years old. With the aid of computer-generated effects, and on occasion the bodies of other actors, the character becomes younger and younger, a process that at one point coincides with Pitt’s actual age and appearance, but then passes it by as Benjamin makes his journey toward infancy. This inversion of time inevitably plays on the actor’s beauty and celebrity. Celebrity is not identical to fame. It consists only of the proliferation of a person’s image in the media — the more images, the more celebrity. Anyone who has ever stood in a checkout line at a grocery store and glanced even briefly at the covers of the magazines for sale recognizes Brad Pitt. Because the movie’s adventure is less about a particular person’s psychology and more about a man’s body headed in the wrong direction, the cultural commodity, Brad, eclipses Benjamin when he emerges from the digital disguises midway through the story. This effect cannot be attributed to Pitt’s acting.

Pitt has been compared (in the same sentence) to Gary Cooper and Marilyn Monroe. His performance as a carnal, morally dubious hitchhiker in “Thelma & Louise” instantly made him both a star and an erotic object. Cinema has always been a grand forum for the beautiful body. For one thing, people are so large in the movies. The lovely giants on the screen dwarf those of us in the audience, and we find ourselves in another, bigger world. The television or computer screen shrinks a movie’s scale, which is why the trend toward watching at home has saddened so many filmmakers. But large or small, the bodies of movie stars cannot be possessed. They are projections only, onto which we, in turn, project our own fantasies. Characters in a film, like those in a novel, are fictions, but in film, actors must literally embody their roles. The morbid curiosity about the “real” lives of movie stars turns on the fact that a totally inaccessible body is nevertheless made of someone’s actual flesh.

If Pitt’s “real life” remains a subject of continual, obsessive interest, it is equaled only by the continuing commentary about his body: his muscular physique, his boyish face, the appearance or disappearance of a mustache or beard and his aging. The scrutiny once reserved for women in mass culture has crossed the sexual border over to men. Does Brad Pitt have gray hairs? Are those wrinkles around his mouth? Has the skin under his eyes begun to sag? Has he had plastic surgery? Male vanity has always been with us, but cultivating it has always carried a certain danger. Trends toward androgyny may have eroded the idea that men must hide a desire to “look good,” but the “dandy” can still slide easily into the “fairy.” Striving to be physically beautiful is regarded as a feminine and feminizing preoccupation.

The ancient Greeks, by contrast, idealized the bodies of men. Beauty was not suspicious for the Greeks; nobility of form was linked to nobility of spirit. The distinction between inside and outside lacked the sharpness we give it today, which meant that the misshapen and deformed were shunned and hidden away — the appalling underside of that soma/psyche connection. In Athens, Pitt’s athletic beauty would have been universally admired.

And yet, even today, the beautiful man can outshine the beautiful woman. A time comes in “Benjamin Button” when the hero is young enough and the heroine, played by Cate Blanchett, is old enough for the two to consummate their love. At this juncture both characters look like the actors who play them, but Blanchett, lovely as she is, never breaks out of the character she creates. Perhaps because her fame began in heavy Elizabethan costume as the legendary virgin queen, we do not associate her with the words “icon” and “sex goddess.” Pitt is the movie’s Adonis, and in a moment of pure cinematic adoration, we see him in all his young glory on the deck of a moving sailboat, his hair blowing in the wind.

Twice voted “Sexiest Man Alive,” Pitt, like many stars before him, has been squeezed into a media box. An obscure actor in a film about growing young would not appear masked in old age or childhood. The audience would simply witness the character’s physical changes. But a beautiful movie icon doesn’t last a lifetime. Pitt was 28 when “Thelma & Louise” came out. He is now 45. “Benjamin Button” magnifies the icon by playing with that temporal window and, through technical magic, returns the viewer to a Brad Pitt at the peak of his youthful manhood and beauty.